UNDER A CANOPY OF STARS
There are moments in my life when I wonder if what I am experiencing is not solely in my imagination. I wonder if what I see, hear, and feel are events that others also see, hear, and feel. Am I only in my mind? Somehow, reading a number of books assures me that there are really things out there and not merely inside my brain. That there are other people, living or dead, which have ideas that are similar to mine. Or if not similar, their ideas raise issues and give me points to think about and ponder. I am particularly conscious about Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, giving me the feeling of angst about my human condition.
I had been through the deaths of my father, mother and three sisters. However, it was only when our dog Conan, a half Japanese Spitz half poodle, died when I seriously wondered about the existence of souls. What is the stuff of souls made of: energy? When Conan the dog died it struck me that while the physical body becomes lifeless, his life force must have gone somewhere. If life is made of the same stuff, whether human, animal or plant, we must be immersed, not in discrete clumps of energy, but something else in an energy field. God? However, we have such phenomena as ghostings, where the likeness of the persons are seen and recognized as distinctly as someone known to have existed before. These are not perceptions unique to an individual but are shared with others.
Before one of my sisters died she claimed to have seen the bluish apparition of our maternal grandfather walking around our ancestral house in the province. Even prior to that, she also saw the ghost of the doctor who used to lease a space for his clinic in front of our ancestral house but was murdered by a drug syndicate. I have never seen a ghost yet. I do not know how I will react if I do. I surely know how to be scared. I have always been apprehensive about seeing manifestations of known dead people. On the other hand, I have tried to face up to such eventuality. For instance there was haunting in one of the offices I was assigned to. One of our computer programmers died on a Friday, but everybody swore that they saw him mingling with a group of programmers in the parking area the following day. Then when something manifested in his space in the office after he was buried, there was panic among the programmers, who rushed out and refused to go back inside. I went inside the hastily abandoned office and tried to confront the apparition but nothing appeared to me. After that, the programmers returned, believing that I had exorcised the ghost.
I’ve always wondered how it is to die. Perhaps there is truth to the pain of being punished for sins committed in life. Somehow, I also think there is oblivion and forgetting. Shakespeare was very candid about the question, especially in his famous soliloquy of Hamlet. Life is the interlude of remembrances of things experienced in our present existence but begins and ends in eternal forgetting. And yet, while I walked the streets and see the flowering bushes and the luxuriant green of the trees lining the streets of the suburban village I live in, I could not help imagine the nostalgia of being beyond living. After death, can we really remember our lives spent on earth? Still, I could not put so much belief in reincarnation and the claim that we can remember past previous lives. Most of the regressions, the process of being hypnotized to raise past memories, always resulted in persons being pharaohs, or queens, or Roman warriors (like Patton) that could have been influenced by readings on history.
On the other hand, why not wonder what life is? We think about death and dissolution. We think and hope for immortality and endlessness. But about life, what is it? It takes nine months of gestation for a human being—shorter time spans for some species, longer for others—but the process is the same: fertilization, gestation, birth. However, even the beginning or even before fertilization there must have existed something that has to unite with something to “become.” At the more physical level, we have come to know charged particles that combine to produce more complicated organisms that could even become pulsating entities that have life. Plants, animals, men.
What is life really? Coupled with consciousness, awareness, and intelligence. To know, has it really many levels? Conan, my dead dog, surely had consciousness, awareness. He even manifested having a conscience and a seemingly deep sense of guilt. He used to slink away with a guilty look if he somehow accidentally hurt someone among my family. Or he knew with whom he could feint ferocity and play being aggressive. He knew enough to understand my signal “Green Cross” (the rubbing alcohol) for him to leave the room or else get a spray of the liquid which he detested. But even when he obeyed me, he would turn around at the doorway, face me and growl his objections. Why was he the gentle, harmless dog that he was? His life, what was it?
What is our life? An awakening from nothing? And to die, to sleep once more into nothing. Life is not merely the accumulation of atoms in different combinations to last for a particular duration depending on the binding force of the constituent building blocks of a living entity. What is the purpose of all the studies and the accumulation of knowledge turned over to us by those who lived before us? Do we really need them in the state of our nothingness? In the prospect of eternity, does it matter for man to acquire knowledge? And for what? How could his knowledge of Earth matter in the enormous expanse of the universe with its myriads of galaxies?
Additionally, thinking about life somehow makes me wonder how it would be when I die. I leave behind this set of writings, which will outlive me and perhaps rage, maybe not in the same high level and character as the classics, in the minds of those who will read and understand me. Or perhaps I am merely deluding myself that my works will outlive me. Instead, the magnetic imprints I manage to activate would be erased by an electric force. And even if I manage to have these magnetic impulses transformed into hard copy, or on paper, nothing will prevent their obliteration by fire or water.
I try to look at the skies every evening as I walk home. I can see only a few stars due to the clouds and the pollution. So far, every summer evening I can only recognize the belt of Orion almost at the zenith, giving me an idea where the ecliptic passes through. If the Moon is a crescent, whether waxing or waning, it also gives me an idea of how far it is from the ecliptic by the angle of its horns. Every time I look at the heavens and realize the spread and distribution of the stars, there ought to be some influences exerted by them. Then there must be the record of the amount of stellar radiations in effect during particular times in the past. Astronomers turn cosmologists and hypothesize a lot about the beginnings of the universe. Radio astronomy claims to tap and record the radiations of the stars that occurred millions of years past. But their discourses and writings are so filled with mathematical equations that leave me confused as ever. Myths are more interesting to read. Possibly because these mythical presentations arouse the archetypal images and emotions in our individual humanity.
There was a time when I was with a group of people sitting in a circle and engaging in “sharing” feelings about religious experiences. When my turn came, I started to recall and share my experience standing alone at night in the desert of Saudi Arabia and looking at the myriads of stars under the starlight, which was as bright as moonlight. I realized my insignificance standing there on the skin of the earth with nothing mediating between me and the heavens. No trees, no bushes, no clouds. Nothing. The recollection of what I felt that night in the desert overwhelmed me at the moment of my recollection and I wept unashamedly before that group of strangers whom I had met for the first time. It was a strange experience — the uncontrollable flow of tears and suppressed sobbing — that somehow humiliated me. From then on, I refused to join any group that sought to bring out “sharing religious experiences.” I don’t want to expose my emotional frailty. I doubt if that crowd understood the emotional stress and pain I underwent in recalling the cosmic loneliness I suffered in the desert. I still am haunted by that vision, and the memory does not fail to give me emotional pain and tears. Even I cannot understand why I had to undergo those bouts of distress. Somehow I think I understand why the great religions are born in the desert wilderness. When you stand alone in the midst of emptiness, you become conscious of Something much much greater than you are.
Awaiting the end of life, nothing seems to be important anymore. I wonder why we ever trouble ourselves accumulating honor, knowledge and wealth. What are the important things really? Jesus truly said not to place priority on things of this world.
And so, I still have to write down my life from the dim memories I can dredge from my mind.
I had been through the deaths of my father, mother and three sisters. However, it was only when our dog Conan, a half Japanese Spitz half poodle, died when I seriously wondered about the existence of souls. What is the stuff of souls made of: energy? When Conan the dog died it struck me that while the physical body becomes lifeless, his life force must have gone somewhere. If life is made of the same stuff, whether human, animal or plant, we must be immersed, not in discrete clumps of energy, but something else in an energy field. God? However, we have such phenomena as ghostings, where the likeness of the persons are seen and recognized as distinctly as someone known to have existed before. These are not perceptions unique to an individual but are shared with others.
Before one of my sisters died she claimed to have seen the bluish apparition of our maternal grandfather walking around our ancestral house in the province. Even prior to that, she also saw the ghost of the doctor who used to lease a space for his clinic in front of our ancestral house but was murdered by a drug syndicate. I have never seen a ghost yet. I do not know how I will react if I do. I surely know how to be scared. I have always been apprehensive about seeing manifestations of known dead people. On the other hand, I have tried to face up to such eventuality. For instance there was haunting in one of the offices I was assigned to. One of our computer programmers died on a Friday, but everybody swore that they saw him mingling with a group of programmers in the parking area the following day. Then when something manifested in his space in the office after he was buried, there was panic among the programmers, who rushed out and refused to go back inside. I went inside the hastily abandoned office and tried to confront the apparition but nothing appeared to me. After that, the programmers returned, believing that I had exorcised the ghost.
I’ve always wondered how it is to die. Perhaps there is truth to the pain of being punished for sins committed in life. Somehow, I also think there is oblivion and forgetting. Shakespeare was very candid about the question, especially in his famous soliloquy of Hamlet. Life is the interlude of remembrances of things experienced in our present existence but begins and ends in eternal forgetting. And yet, while I walked the streets and see the flowering bushes and the luxuriant green of the trees lining the streets of the suburban village I live in, I could not help imagine the nostalgia of being beyond living. After death, can we really remember our lives spent on earth? Still, I could not put so much belief in reincarnation and the claim that we can remember past previous lives. Most of the regressions, the process of being hypnotized to raise past memories, always resulted in persons being pharaohs, or queens, or Roman warriors (like Patton) that could have been influenced by readings on history.
On the other hand, why not wonder what life is? We think about death and dissolution. We think and hope for immortality and endlessness. But about life, what is it? It takes nine months of gestation for a human being—shorter time spans for some species, longer for others—but the process is the same: fertilization, gestation, birth. However, even the beginning or even before fertilization there must have existed something that has to unite with something to “become.” At the more physical level, we have come to know charged particles that combine to produce more complicated organisms that could even become pulsating entities that have life. Plants, animals, men.
What is life really? Coupled with consciousness, awareness, and intelligence. To know, has it really many levels? Conan, my dead dog, surely had consciousness, awareness. He even manifested having a conscience and a seemingly deep sense of guilt. He used to slink away with a guilty look if he somehow accidentally hurt someone among my family. Or he knew with whom he could feint ferocity and play being aggressive. He knew enough to understand my signal “Green Cross” (the rubbing alcohol) for him to leave the room or else get a spray of the liquid which he detested. But even when he obeyed me, he would turn around at the doorway, face me and growl his objections. Why was he the gentle, harmless dog that he was? His life, what was it?
What is our life? An awakening from nothing? And to die, to sleep once more into nothing. Life is not merely the accumulation of atoms in different combinations to last for a particular duration depending on the binding force of the constituent building blocks of a living entity. What is the purpose of all the studies and the accumulation of knowledge turned over to us by those who lived before us? Do we really need them in the state of our nothingness? In the prospect of eternity, does it matter for man to acquire knowledge? And for what? How could his knowledge of Earth matter in the enormous expanse of the universe with its myriads of galaxies?
Additionally, thinking about life somehow makes me wonder how it would be when I die. I leave behind this set of writings, which will outlive me and perhaps rage, maybe not in the same high level and character as the classics, in the minds of those who will read and understand me. Or perhaps I am merely deluding myself that my works will outlive me. Instead, the magnetic imprints I manage to activate would be erased by an electric force. And even if I manage to have these magnetic impulses transformed into hard copy, or on paper, nothing will prevent their obliteration by fire or water.
I try to look at the skies every evening as I walk home. I can see only a few stars due to the clouds and the pollution. So far, every summer evening I can only recognize the belt of Orion almost at the zenith, giving me an idea where the ecliptic passes through. If the Moon is a crescent, whether waxing or waning, it also gives me an idea of how far it is from the ecliptic by the angle of its horns. Every time I look at the heavens and realize the spread and distribution of the stars, there ought to be some influences exerted by them. Then there must be the record of the amount of stellar radiations in effect during particular times in the past. Astronomers turn cosmologists and hypothesize a lot about the beginnings of the universe. Radio astronomy claims to tap and record the radiations of the stars that occurred millions of years past. But their discourses and writings are so filled with mathematical equations that leave me confused as ever. Myths are more interesting to read. Possibly because these mythical presentations arouse the archetypal images and emotions in our individual humanity.
There was a time when I was with a group of people sitting in a circle and engaging in “sharing” feelings about religious experiences. When my turn came, I started to recall and share my experience standing alone at night in the desert of Saudi Arabia and looking at the myriads of stars under the starlight, which was as bright as moonlight. I realized my insignificance standing there on the skin of the earth with nothing mediating between me and the heavens. No trees, no bushes, no clouds. Nothing. The recollection of what I felt that night in the desert overwhelmed me at the moment of my recollection and I wept unashamedly before that group of strangers whom I had met for the first time. It was a strange experience — the uncontrollable flow of tears and suppressed sobbing — that somehow humiliated me. From then on, I refused to join any group that sought to bring out “sharing religious experiences.” I don’t want to expose my emotional frailty. I doubt if that crowd understood the emotional stress and pain I underwent in recalling the cosmic loneliness I suffered in the desert. I still am haunted by that vision, and the memory does not fail to give me emotional pain and tears. Even I cannot understand why I had to undergo those bouts of distress. Somehow I think I understand why the great religions are born in the desert wilderness. When you stand alone in the midst of emptiness, you become conscious of Something much much greater than you are.
Awaiting the end of life, nothing seems to be important anymore. I wonder why we ever trouble ourselves accumulating honor, knowledge and wealth. What are the important things really? Jesus truly said not to place priority on things of this world.
And so, I still have to write down my life from the dim memories I can dredge from my mind.
posted by myvja at
3:11 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home